ACROSS UNKNOWN SOUTH AMERICA 
lower down. Innumerable festoons of creepers hung 
down from those trees. The stream was there 80 metres 
wide, and beautiful that day in great stretches of 4,300 
metres, 1,400 metres, 1,000 metres, 3,000 metres, 1,500 
metres, and 1,200 metres, in a perfectly straight line. The 
forest was occasionally interrupted on one side or the 
other by great expanses of chapada. 
Immense bacabeira palms, 40 to 50 feet high, were 
numerous, most graceful to look at, with their ten or 
eleven huge compound leaves placed like an open fan. 
Yellow filaments of some length hung in a cluster where 
the petiole of the leaves met. 
We arrived at a pedreria , an accumulation of rocks, 
extending almost right across the stream, and which was 
the cause of the placidity of the waters above it. There 
were two channels, one to bearings magnetic 330°, the 
other to 360°, on either side of a central island. We 
followed the first and larger channel. The island, which 
had a most luxuriant growth of trees upon it, was sub¬ 
divided into two by a channel ten metres wide at its 
southeastern end. 
For purposes of identification I named all the islands 
we saw. The larger of these two I called Esmeralda 
Island. In order to establish its exact position I landed 
and took observations for latitude and longitude. Lati¬ 
tude 13° 15'.6 south; longitude 56° 46' west. 
We were then at an elevation of 1,150 feet. The 
temperature in the shade was 77° Fahrenheit and 98° in 
the sun. Six tenths of the sky was covered with thick 
globular clouds, which made the air heavy, although the 
temperature was not excessively high. It must be remem¬ 
bered that in the canoe we were in the sun all the time and 
suffered a good deal in the morning and afternoon, when 
the sun was not high, by the refraction of the sun’s rays 
from the water. The refracted light was so powerful that 
it interfered a good deal with the navigation. The river 
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